Every few nights the telescope photographs the entire southern sky. Over ten years each point in the sky will be imaged about 800 times. The result will be a detailed time-lapse record of the Universe.
The main instrument is a 3200-megapixel camera, the largest digital camera in the world. It captures a new image roughly every 40 seconds. Each night the observatory collects around 10 terabytes of data and generates up to seven million alerts about changes in the sky. These alerts are sorted automatically by special systems (alert brokers) so astronomers can react quickly.
The observatory has already proven itself as a discovery machine. In a month and a half of test observations it found over 11,000 previously unknown asteroids, including 33 near-Earth objects and 380 trans-Neptunian ones. One of the new asteroids is the fastest-spinning body larger than 500 meters ever found.
The goal is not only to catalog the Solar System. Repeated images of the same regions will provide data for studying dark matter and dark energy — the accelerating expansion of the Universe. The final dataset will hold billions of objects with trillions of measurements, available to everyone.